QUEM SÓ TEM UM MARTELO VÊ TODOS OS PROBLEMAS COMO PREGOS: O alívio quantitativo aliviará? (13) O clube dos incréus reforçou-se

Outras marteladas.

Para quem não saiba, Bil Gross foi o líder da PIMCO, uma das maiores empresas de gestão de investimentos com quase 2 biliões (2 milhões de milhões) de activos sob gestão, demitiu-se em Setembro passado e ajudou a criar o Janus Capital Group. Publicou ontem o seu investment outlook para 2015 e foi admitido no clube cada vez menos restrito dos incréus nas virtudes do intervencionismo militante dos bancos centrais. Respigo as seguintes passagens :

«For the past few decades, the secular excess has been on the upside with rapid credit growth, lower interest rates and tighter risk spreads dominating the long-term trend. There have been dramatic reversals as with the Lehman Brothers collapse, the Asia/dot-com crisis around the turn of the century, and of course 1987’s one-day crash, but each reversal was met with a new and increasingly innovative monetary policy initiative on the part of the central banks that kept the bull market in asset prices alive.

(…) Consistently looser regulatory policies contributed immensely as well. The Bank Credit Analyst labels this history as the “debt supercycle,” which is as descriptive as it gets. Each downward spike in the economy and its related financial markets was met with additional credit expansion generated by lower interest rates, financial innovation and regulatory easing, or more recently, direct central bank purchasing of assets labeled “Quantitative Easing.” The power of additional and cheaper credit to add to economic growth and financial asset bull markets has been underappreciated by investors since 1981. Even with the recognition of the Minsky Moment in 2008 and his commonsensical reflection that “stability ultimately leads to instability,” investors have continued to assume that monetary (and at times fiscal) policy could contain the long-term business cycle and produce continuing prosperity for investors in a multitude of asset classes both domestically and externally in emerging markets.

MarketWatch

(…) Finance – instead of functioning as a building block of the real economy – breaks it down. Investment is discouraged rather than encouraged due to declining ROIs and ROEs. In turn, financial economy asset class structures such as money market funds, banking, insurance, pensions, and even household balance sheets malfunction as the historical returns necessary to justify future liabilities become impossible to attain. Yields for savers become too low to meet liabilities. Both the real and the finance-based economies become threatened with the zero-based, nearly free money available for the taking. It’s as if the rules of finance, like the quantum rules of particles, have reversed or at least negated what we historically believed to be true.

And so that is why – at some future date – at some future Ides of March or May or November 2015, asset returns in many categories may turn negative.»